Monday, November 9, 2009

Nestle Smarties

Smarties

As I've mentioned before, in nearly every country but the United States, Smarties are candy-coated chocolates made by Nestle. Until I was in my 20s, I had never tasted these non-sugar disk Smarties, so this review is probably biased.

Naturally, I can't fight the temptation to compare them to M&Ms. Right away, the different colors of the Smarties appealed to me (pink and purple as standard colors!), and they were also slightly bigger than plain M&Ms.

Smarties

There wasn't much of a scent (the cardboard smelled stronger than the candy), and the taste immediately reminded me of Halloween chocolate - a blend of candy and chocolate flavors stewing together in a vat. The candy coating seemed to add a sugary flavor, and because it is pretty thick, these were very crunchy.

I was reminded of Cadbury Mini Eggs (the chocolate eggs coated with a spotted candy shell to look like bird eggs) as well, but Smarties are much smaller than those. As a result, the chocolate seemed dominated by the shell. Although I don't think I'd turn these down if they were offered to me, I think I'd prefer plain M&Ms...but that's only if plain M&Ms and Smarties were my only choices.

Check out this head-to-head comparison at Candy Blog.

C+

Nestle website

5 comments:

Kelly said...

I prefer smarties because of the buttery flavour of the shell. I only just recently noticed the difference between m&m's when I recently revisited smarties for the first time in 20 years.

Those are mega smarties though! Would love to try them anyway :)

Great review!

ebidebby said...

Thanks! Do people in Australia seem to prefer one over the other?

Also, I didn't know normal Smarties were smaller? This was a very small box, so they look pretty big.

Kelly said...

In Australia smarties are marketed more towards kids, and m&ms teens onwards.

Those smarties seem much bigger than ours, our are quite small about the same as a regular m&m. It could be just the photo making them look big, but did you think they were bigger than a regular chocolate m&m in size when you ate them?

ebidebby said...

Yep, they did seem a little bigger. Hmm, I wonder if it's just the Canadian ones?

Nicole Rates It said...

I also prefer Smarties to M&M's. They taste better, and the colors are more fun. I brought back several tubes when I returned from London last month.